Preface

Contributions by many persons and organisations have made publication of this volume possible. As editors, we wish to thank David Ringrose, David Tirr and Heidi Hiltunen of the European Commission for supporting this idea for academic cooperation. We are grateful to Veronica Kelly, Robin Hammond and Alexei Zverev for their accurate translations and language corrections. This project would have been impossible without the help of H.E. Zurab Abashidze and Kakha Gogolashvili of the Georgian Embassy in Brussels, and without the support of the Georgian and Abkhaz authorities.
We are most grateful to Dr. Uwe Halbach for his proposal to publish this
volume as "Sonderveröffentlichung des Bundesinstituts für
ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien" and to Anthony Antoine, Bram Dumolin and Carolyn Ducker for their help in editing the WWW version of this publication.

The conference and the publication has been financed by a
TACIS grant. Additional financial support has been given by the Vrije
Universiteit Brussel and the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
(Vlaanderen) and UNDP.

The English book version is published by BIOst. The Russian version is being
published by Ves Mir, Moscow. The electronic version in both languages is
being published in Caucasian Regional Studies, Vol. 3, No 2 & 3, 1998
(http://poli.vub.ac.be/publi/crs/).